A chronicle of the development of GONE GITMO, a virtual installation of Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life. GONE GITMO is a collaboration between Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil.

Machinima Report

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Arrival

Unlike prisoners in U.S. prisons who presumably know how and why they are incarcerated and the nature of the charges against them, detainees in Guantánamo prison arrived there with minimal, if any, information

Nonny wanted a visitor to our site to be similarly stripped of rights and orientation and to experience a sense of the violence and despair of being hooded and herded into a cage. This posed a challenge for Second Life, a virtual world as opposed to a MMORG, avatars are not accustomed to role playing. However, we could around this by offering a visitor a HUD (Heads Up Display) which, when accepted, gave us the power to control their avatar.

Nonny scripted the experience cinematically: first the hood would come down, accompanied by audio of the C-17 transport plan landing, shouts and kicks to get moving, arriving, shackled and kneeling in a cage in Camp X-Ray.

BAVC made its extraordinary video and audio resources available to us and we grabbed a camera. In order to simulate a hood under the bright Cuban sun we put my black sweater over the lens, shot at the pavement and hoped it would look like sunlight percolating through wool. Nonny worked in BAVC’s audio suite to mix the audio track and Ben did the programming to attach the experience to the HUD and thus, the user.

We contract with a contact of Ben’s to make an orange jumpsuit, It feels strange to be “wearing” an orange jumpsuit.

Profile

Acknowledgments

GONE GITMO was developed at a MacArthur sponsored residency at BAVC New Media Producers Institute in 2007.Thanks to our early supporters: Joi Ito, Ben Batstone-Cunningham, and Steve Anderson and Holly Willis of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC School of Cinemtatic Arts. Acknowledgements also to the Annenberg School of Communicatios: Professor Douglas Thomas, Tori Horton, Evonne Heyning. Also Frank Fox, Cinco Pizzocato and Matthew Lee, Bernard Drax.